On the Development of Prognostics and System Health Management (PHM) Techniques for ReRAM Applications

The resistive switching (RS) technology has many promising applications, but the inherent variability of RS devices has been an important obstacle for the progress towards mass production. Nonidealities of device switching performance have been widely modeled so far, and device degradation has been addressed through testing for fault diagnosis. However, online soft-error “prognosis” concerning both the progressive degradation and transition faults, has been given little consideration. In this direction, we present preliminary results towards the development of prognostics and system health management (PHM) techniques for resistive memory (ReRAM) applications. We propose addressing soft errors through a rich in context scheme used to encode binary information in form of resistance. In out simulations we assumed a ReRAM driver with multi-level READ capability and developed an enhanced progressive feedback-WRITE scheme to ensure not only successful WRITE and reliable READ operations, but also to permit the early online prognosis of potential device failure. Preliminary system-level simulation results validate the expected functionality and represent a reasonable approach towards the design of robust ReRAM controllers.